Infotrade

Want to go from being a high school chemistry teacher to a violent, millionaire drug kingpin? OK, maybe you don’t. But there are still plenty of lessons to learn from Walter White’s mesmerizing transformation in   Breaking Bad . Whatever else White is, including anti-hero or downright villain, he’s an example for anyone looking to strike out on their own and build their own business — or simply survive and advance within their current company. Your profession may be significantly less exciting (and correspondingly less risky), but many of the same forces are at play everywhere. On the eve of the   Breaking Bad   fifth season premiere, it’s the perfect time to walk in Walter White’s footsteps — if you dare. * * Spoilers ahead! * * 1) Don’t be afraid of a career change. White is the poster child for a mid-life career change. He built up significant skills and experience in research, but missed out on a big break (or was screwed out of such an opportuni...

We live in a Golden Age of Sales. There are better tools than ever before for quickly crafting and tailoring pitches to reach the right people. We have data to tell us what works, and we have testing tools that can get down to the individual email level. But most importantly, we have unprecedented access to more people. Slowly but surely, a sales meritocracy is supplanting the various “good old boys” networks. A scrappy hustler can connect with anyone, from CEOs and co-founders to just about anyone else on the corporate contact list. The bummer is that most tech companies are fouling up an epic opportunity to pitch in, be memorable, and add value. When I read Sarah’s recent post about   Yammer’s tone-deaf pitch to her,   I cringed, especially as she had written only days before that she was thinking about leaving Yammer. Nobody to my knowledge reached out to acknowledge that, but she did get an insidious pitch to “upgrade” from her “trial account.” ...

When Jess Zimmerman reported for her annual gynecological exam last February, her doctor was interested in assessing more than just her vaginal health—he wanted to talk about her weight. "He asked what I ate, but he didn’t wait for an answer," Zimmerman   writes . "I had to exercise more, he said, having no idea how much I was exercising. I also needed to eat less [of] whatever it was I was eating." When it came time for another checkup, her experience of being bullied by a doctor who "made incorrect guesses about my habits based on my body" made her think twice about making another appointment. "Something as mild as a pre-smear dressing-down can seriously wreck your trust in doctors for a while," Zimmerman says. In 2007, researchers from Yale University  asked more than 2,000 men and women  to report the weight-related stigma they've experienced in their everyday lives. Across a range of BMIs, women were more than twice as likely as men—...

“This guy” is   Dalton Caldwell , former CEO of streaming music service Imeem, the guy who built Picplz that got leapfrogged by Instagram, and now founder of   App.net . (I’ve met him a few times, btw, and he’s very nice!) Dalton is the guy who wrote the post about   the Twitter could have been , which I   linked to   last week. And now he’s   trying to raise $500,000   to fund a new, Twitter-like service that pledges to always be open to developers and never put advertisers before users. (Here’s   his “audacious proposal.” ) Interesting. Given how trendy crowdfunding campaigns are these days, I think he might actually be able to raise the money. (I’m in for $50, why not?) The real question, of course, is whether enough people will   use   the new service to make it fun and interesting. Social networks become exponentially more useful and valuable as more people join. And I don’t think most of the people I follow on Twitte...

AP A law school graduate receives her degree in May. Prospective law school students worried about landing a job after graduation ( and they probably should be ), may want to take a look at the University of Houston’s curriculum. The UH law school will be cashing in on one of the few brights spots for the legal profession these days: corporate compliance. This coming spring, the university will offer a class called “International Corporate Compliance.” Its professors say its the first class on corporate compliance offered by an American law school. To the uninitiated, some of the topics laid out in the syllabus look less than scintillating: Class 5: Hot Topics in Corporate Compliance: Trade Control Compliance and Environmental Risk Class 6: Internal Audits & Internal Investigations Class 7: Using Data Analytics in Compliance Programs Students may yawn, but they also may land a job. Most know the job market for lawyers is grim. Members of the law-school class of...

 Role-playing hack-and-slasher Diablo III received an   update   to its real-money auction house system today, enabling players to trade actual currency for in-game gold. As of this writing, the current ratio between gold and dollars sits at 25 cents per 100,000 gold, or $2.50 for 1 million gold. Developer Blizzard also updated its   Diablo III game guide   with an in-depth explanation of the calculations and factors driving the chance of discovering an item with magical properties. Blizzard’s inclusion of an auction house system within Diablo III divided critics and optimists alike. Although the developer’s efforts stem from an ambitious move to curtail third-party (and illegal) gold- and item-selling schemes, the simple act of spending real cash for in-game boosts still carries a palpable stigma within the community. What do you think? Will the accessibility of piles of gold for less than a McDonald’s meal sour Diablo III’s experience?